Jane Mayer in The New Yorker Tells Us About America's Top Clandestine Al Qaeda Source

Here's a snip but you want to read the rest at The New Yorker:

For nearly a decade, a former Al Qaeda operative named Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl has been living in the United States government’s witness-protection program, under an assumed identity. A Sudanese citizen and a onetime confidant of Osama bin Laden’s, Fadl is expected to serve as a central witness in the prosecutions of at least two suspected terrorists being held at the U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Fadl, a dark-skinned man with close-cropped hair and a mischievous smile, entered government custody in 1996, after walking into the U.S. Embassy in Eritrea and confessing to membership in Al Qaeda. Since then, he has lived in at least half a dozen American towns. (He spent the first eighteen months in a Residence Inn in New Jersey, guarded by several armed F.B.I. agents; subsequently, his wife and children joined him in America, and the family was transferred to a series of undisclosed locations.) Fadl, who is now in his forties, is arguably the United States’ most valuable informant on Al Qaeda; he has provided crucial intelligence about the group’s operations and has made positive identifications of suspected members. At the same time, Fadl—an incessant troublemaker who is known to a small group of F.B.I. agents simply as Junior—has tried the patience of the officials in whose care he resides. “Junior’s a problem child,” Jack Cloonan, a former special agent for the F.B.I., who is now the president of a crisis-management firm, says.

Fadl’s only public appearance to date as a state’s witness occurred in Manhattan in 2001, eight months before the September 11th attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Fadl, who was identified only as “Confidential Source 1,” spoke for several days, and his testimony proved critical in the conviction of four Al Qaeda associates who were being tried for their roles in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed two hundred and twenty-four people. Photographers and courtroom artists were forbidden to depict his face, but reporters described him as testifying calmly in heavily accented English and wearing a white skullcap, an open-collared shirt, and jeans.
According to Fadl, he met bin Laden in Afghanistan, where he had gone in his early twenties to fight against the Soviet Union. He testified that he was one of the first people to join Al Qaeda, in 1989; soon afterward, he moved back to Sudan, where he helped bin Laden acquire properties and front companies. At a time when most Americans knew little about Al Qaeda, Fadl provided the jury with a lengthy tutorial, describing the organization’s cellular structure and its training camps, where recruits learned how to handle weapons and were taught a militant view of Islam. He characterized bin Laden as a man determined to attack the United States—even with nuclear weapons if he could. In the early nineties, he testified, bin Laden issued a secret fatwa at a meeting in Sudan: “It say, ‘We cannot let the American army stay in the Gulf area and take our oil, take our money, and we have to do something to take them out. We have to fight them.’ ” (Fadl also admitted to a life style that was less than pious. Under questioning, he confessed that, prior to joining Al Qaeda, he had nearly been arrested for smoking marijuana with a friend, on a trip to Saudi Arabia; the friend had gone to jail for two years, he said, adding, “I escaped to Sudan.”) In the end, the four Embassy-bombing suspects were convicted on three hundred and two terrorism-related charges, and were given life sentences.